In the spirit of the baseball playoffs, I started thinking about hitting streaks and 0-fers, and how they relate to my own sexual history. It took me a long time to reach the majors, after college in fact, but I made up for it with enthusiasm and energy. I was no Rookie of the Year, but I had a solid first season, learned a few things, and took chances. Things were looking good, but quickly took a turn for the worse. I’ve mostly been out of the game, but every few years would somehow manage to get an at-bat, but even those rare opportunities have dried up. I still love the game, and would love to play an inning now and again, but these days I’m just a spectator. After all, who would sign up someone who hasn’t even had a base hit in the past six years?

I was sitting at the bar of the Celtic Hearth on Water Street in St. John’s, Newfoundland watching the game when a retired couple came in and sat beside me. The gentleman asked for a Guinness and was shocked to hear they didn’t have it, but rather Kilkenny.

Surprising that they didn’t, but moreso that they usually do but were somehow out, and most surprising that this wasn’t the first bar on the strip he’d asked after a Guinness, only to be denied. He turned to me and asked could I believe it? His people had settled the damn place and they didn’t have Guinness?

Where are you from? I asked. Originally Ireland but lately Sudbury. We talked a bit about the footie and then he left, off on his appallingly quixotic search for Guinness in a city more Irish than Ireland.

This week Alex Rodriguez, retired Major League Baseball player and human steroid depository, made his debut in the broadcast booth. In typical A-Rod fashion, what should have been an easy home run became a bizarre scandal, with sharp-eyed viewers zooming in on his notebook only to see cryptic references to “birth control,” “baby”, and most-tantalizingly, “pull out stuff.” What all of this means, and why Rodriguez had this on his mind rather than a meaningless May baseball game, remains a mystery, but the other question we’re all wondering is, what else is in that notebook? The Center for Poor Karma & Pain’s crack researchers and spies are, as always, on the job and offer this exclusive look beyond the news.

p. 23 – “Where are my taco-flavoured kisses?”

p. 30 – “Find out: how many home runs wd potential baby have to hit to pass Griffeys for all-time father/son record?”

p. 37 – “A-Rod2 or 2Rod?”

p. 41 – “are purple lips hereditary or recessive?”

p. 43 – “move Phil Rizzutto to back of monument park? who is more beloved? hit more home runs than him after all”

Reading Rainbow – encourages children to read books but never has an episode about The Art of the Deal. Sad!

Planned Parenthood – who needs to plan parenthood? Just grab ‘em by the pussy and whatever happens, happens. (Always have a rock-solid pre-nup though, since women are always after your money.)

The Shriners – Anti-American tiny cars. When did America stop winning? When we stopped having big cars. Also, those things don’t run on coal so they’re destroying American jobs!

4-H Club – Animal husbandry, are you kidding me? Marriage is supposed to be between one man and one woman, then another woman whenever he wants to switch things up.

The Democrats – Losers. Always whining about how they won the popular vote. Since when is being President a popularity contest? By the way, they didn’t actually win the popular vote, I did. If I’d wanted to win the popular vote I would have done it. Next time I will, believe me. Looking to beat Stalin’s record of 99.9% in 2020!

As Donald Trump attempts to put questions about President Barack Obama’s birthplace behind him, another controversy, this time about Trump himself, is starting to gain attention. And like so many other questions about the Republican Presidential candidate, from his sewer rat’s nest hair-do to his inexplicably orange skin to his tiny baby hands, this one has to do with his body: in this case, his penis, and specifically its girth, or more properly its lack of girth.

If the rumours about Trump’s penis that are starting to become more than the whispers that have long-circulated in New York, Miss Universe pageants, Atlantic City, and Trump family reunions are being spoken out loud more and more frequently, Mr. Trump has only himself to blame. By constantly talking about his sexual conquests, both in and out of marriage, he has surely courted this controversy: women are happy to put unsatisfying sexual experiences behind them and be discrete, especially when it comes to the physical deficiencies of sexual partners, and that’s even more true when it comes to self-aggrandizing, shit-heel billionaires. But Trump insisted on airing his dirty laundry in public, and it’s no surprise that discussion eventually turned to his tighty-whities and how they were never particularly full.

At the same time, his inability to allow the snarky comments about his small hands pass without comment led ex-partners to compare notes and reporters to connect the dots. (You know what they say about men with small hands.) Trump is notoriously thin-skinned when it comes to criticism of himself, and more and more talk is centering on his equally thin-skinned penis, which rumours indicate is of average length, but exceedingly small in circumference, or in common parlance, “girth.”

The small but growing (which cannot be said about Trump’s penis, according to one ex-girlfriend: “It’s just small”) “girther” movement is demanding assurances from the Trump campaign that his penis is of at least average American girth, while criticizing the so-called “lengthers” who are focused on its length. “We in the Republican Party, and others who want to Make America Great Again, are not concerned about penis length,” claims a spokesman, “because we know that our diversity is our strength. The important thing is that the President has a penis, whatever length it happens to be. But it would just make all of us more comfortable to know that The Donald’s packing something substantial. Americans of all colours and lengths know that Hillary Clinton and the Democrats are not the answer to solving our problems. I mean, she doesn’t even have a penis!”

For his part, Trump insists that he has “tremendous girth, beautiful girth, it’s quite something… I can barely fit my hand around it, not that I need to masturbate, I have my pick of gorgeous women… believe me, there’s no issue down there!” When asked to have the distance between his ring finger and thumb measured, however, the candidate demurred, saying that he couldn’t allow that since he was under audit.

It took me more than forty years to sing in public, but now I quite enjoy it, even if I still have anxiety because I know I don’t sing well. Still, it’s a long way from the time when I wouldn’t even sing in front of my family. My father was happy to sing but he embarrassed me, because he always sang with a huge smile on his face, while I rarely smiled at all. I can’t pinpoint the time when I changed from the happy child that can be seen in early photos to the miserable bastard that I am now. It was well before the typical age when changes like that happen, as a teenager. Was it the same age–eight or nine–as I stopped believing in Satan, and then God? But shouldn’t that have been a happy time, knowing I was free of the illusions that held most of the world down? Or did I then begin to mourn the realization that I was different, and therefore doomed to a life of loneliness? That was a tough understanding to come to at such an early age, especially since it’s turned out not to be a pessimistic lie, but eerily prescient: I have indeed spent the bulk of my life alone. Contrary to popular opinion, my greatest fear isn’t to die alone, but to live alone, since I have to face that reality every day, and I’ve always had the feeling that, while I may not be immortal (although, I might be, it remains to be seen), I’m going to live for an awfully, terribly long time. When Halley’s Comet was all the rage in 1986, and everyone was thrilling to its rare appearance, I determined that I’d wait until the next time it came back to view it, even though I’d begged for a telescope for Christmas, largely on the premise that I’d need it for this once-in-a-lifetime experience. Well, once-in-a-lifetime experience for most, but surely at least twice-in-a-lifetime for me.